While
more than 140,000 US troops in Iraq continue trying to impose security in
advance of the June 30 handover of limited sovereignty to the new Iraqi
administration, the security situation in nearby Afghanistan continues to
deteriorate.

With national elections
scheduled for just three months away, observers say that tribal warlords, as
well as resurgent Taliban forces, appear as strong as at any time since the
Taliban were ousted 30 months ago, making it increasingly unlikely that the
balloting, if it even goes forward, will be judged free and fair by
international and other observers.

"Trends are going the wrong
way," according to Mark Schneider, the Washington director of the
International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict resolution think-tank.
"Militias around the country pose a threat to the possibility of any
credible elections taking place."

In Afghanistan, the US has
some 20,000 troops mostly chasing Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, yet the
country receives little attention.

That was made painfully
clear last week when visiting President Hamid Karzai, resplendent in his
trademark peacock-green cape, received virtually no media attention at all
despite his address to a joint session of Congress and his joint appearance
with President George W Bush for a White House Rose Garden press conference,
during which he remained largely silent as his host fended off questions
about US abuses of detainees in both Afghanistan and Iraq and the domestic
economy.

Officially, Washington
remains upbeat about Afghanistan. Addressing a group at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies on Monday, ambassador William Taylor,
the State Department coordinator for Afghanistan, insisted that United
Nations officials had registered more than 4 million voters to date and that
as many as 100,000 more were being registered each day. He said about 36% of
the registrants were women.

The UN estimates the total
number of eligible voters in Afghanistan at a little more than 10 million.
"If we get at least 6 million voters registered," Taylor said, "that will be
a critical mass."

At the same time, the envoy
admitted that the security situation leaves much to be desired and could
easily interfere with the fairness of the upcoming election, which will
determine the presidency and the lower house of parliament.

"This is not going to be
pretty," he said, noting that local militias, many of them fueled by
revenues from the thriving opium trade, are likely to practice intimidation
against voters, particularly in the balloting for parliament.

The lack of security was
made distressingly clear just in the past few days, as the Karzai-appointed
governor of Ghor province was chased from his capital after clashes between
the provincial army chief and a rival militia that reportedly killed at
least 10 people. The incident was the third in recent months where a
governor had been forced to flee his post by warlords.

US military casualties,
although still minimal compared to Iraq, have also risen sharply, even as
Washington increased the number of troops it is devoting to fighting the
Taliban and al-Qaeda in the mainly Pashtun south and southeast, particularly
along the border with Pakistan.

In addition, more aid
workers - at least 18, five of them foreign nationals - have been killed by
suspected Taliban forces than at any time since US-backed forces ousted the
Taliban in late 2001. As a result, many non-governmental organizations have
withdrawn their staff, bringing reconstruction efforts to a standstill.

In addition to the US
troops, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has some 6,500
peacekeepers in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF), all of whom, however, are confined to Kabul. Another 250
German-led troops make up a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) assigned to
Kunduz, a relatively quiet northern city.

NATO pledged to provide the
equipment (including helicopters) and troops to supply another four PRTs to
strategic cities around the country in order to extend Karzai's authority
well into the countryside and stabilize the situation through the deployment
of rapid-reaction forces there, but these have not been forthcoming - to the
great frustration of the US, as well as Karzai himself.

With US troops seeking to
engage the Taliban and al-Qaeda, "Karzai's writ is pretty much co-terminous
with [the] NATO-ISAF [forces]," according to John Stuart Blackton, a
counter-insurgency specialist who directs Strategic Advisory Services, a
military consultancy group. He noted that the weekend's events in Ghor
province were "emblematic [of the] collapse of the central government's
authority".

As to who could take on the
warlords and regional chiefs at this point to extend Kabul's authority,
Blackton said the Afghan National Army was still too small and
inexperienced, while it was not within NATO's mandate, and the US still
considers the hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda a higher priority.

NATO's failure so far to
fulfill its commitments, according to Schneider, virtually ensures that
elections in the countryside will not be fairly conducted in September.
"Unless you have an expanded security force outside Kabul, I don't see how
you're going to have international observers," he said, noting that three UN
election workers, including two British security experts, were killed by
suspected Taliban forces in Nuristan province last month.

A free and fair election
"is definitely not going to take place if these militias are still
operating", he went on, noting that the schedule for the disarmament and
demobilization of at least 100,000 militia fighters is lagging hopelessly
behind. Political parties without an armed wing simply "won't be able to
participate in the elections without fear".

The reticence of
Washington's NATO allies to provide more troops derives from a number of
factors, according to both Schneider and Blackton.

The fact that the US
opposed ISAF's expansion into the countryside because it feared that the
peacekeepers might interfere with US military operations until last summer
resulted in a serious loss of momentum, Schneider said. Meanwhile, the Bush
administration's invasion of Iraq resulted in a loss of political influence
- of "soft power" - in the capitals of its European allies, according to
Blackton.

"Afghanistan policy is
hostage to Iraq policy," he said, noting that Washington's own forces have
become over-stretched as a result of the Iraq occupation, as well.

Even Taylor, who initially
blamed the "usual suspects" in Europe for NATO's failure to deliver,
admitted that Washington's pressure on its NATO allies to contribute as well
to Iraq had "complicated the discussion".

Schneider said neither the
US nor NATO/ISAF is taking on the exploding opium production, which is
expected to hit all-time highs this year, and could account for as much as
half the country's estimated gross domestic product. Much of the proceeds,
according to Schneider and other experts, are funding militias, some of
which have cooperated with US forces.